In this article, I explore the impact of slavery and the Slave trade on the most fundamental relationship in human societies, the bond between mother and child. Firstly, I review European accounts of motherhood and childrearing (pre-enslavement) in the African cultures of origin. Secondly, I address the traumas of dislocation and enslavement during the Middle Passage. This is followed by some insights into the experiences of women and children in Caribbean Slave societies where I argue that, despite the harsh conditions, African-derived conceptualisations of motherhood and parenting endured. I conclude with a brief consideration of the reverberations of slavery into the post slavery era, specifically in relation to European attempts to change African-derived practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];.
Discusses the social conditions and family relations of African-Caribbean women migrants in Canada from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Explores the complexities of relationship between, migrant labor, motherhood, and transnationalism.
363 p., investigates the pre- and post- migratory experiences of working-class African-Caribbean women from the English-speaking Caribbean who left their children in their home countries while pursuing better economic opportunities in Canada from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The author problematizes the intersectional relationship between female migrant labor, transnationality and motherhood within the rubric of globalized gender, race and class relations. Given the centrality of African-Caribbean women's worker-mother role in their societies, further exploration of this role within global migration is important in order to recognize its significant gendered impact on women's labor and familial relations on a transnational level.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
148 p, Episodes from the young life of Annie John, aged 10 to 17, as she grows up on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. This is a magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie's far from naive awareness of the world around her. Death, illness, and poverty intrude on the narrator's perceptive sensibility from time to time, but even these experiences instruct her and expand her understanding of life and its shifting reality.Although Annie leaves Antigua at the end of the novel for a new role as a student in England, the hollowness she feels at her departure is balanced by the new self that awaits her as she begins the search for her own identity. A poetic and intensely moving work from the author of At the Bottom of the River.;
Kuwabong suggests that both Lorna Goodison's and Claire Harris's poetic of matrilineage survives on their positive representation of the mother-daughter relationship, which ideologically borders on the Caribbean concept of a daughter becoming her mother
